Press Releases

Washington, D.C. (March 26, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel demanding urgent answers regarding the Trump Administration’s reckless usage of Signal, a commercial messaging application, to discuss attack plans in a group chat that included The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, after the news outlet today published the full contents of the bombshell thread.

“I write to you today about the decision by multiple senior members of the Administration to use a commercial messaging application to discuss specific details about impending military strikes in a group conversation that also inadvertently included a journalist. This conduct, which put both intelligence and the lives of service members at risk, likely violates multiple federal criminal and civil statutes that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have a duty to enforce. You thus have a responsibility to investigate this shocking episode. The American people have a right to know how pervasive this kind of casual breach of national security is and whether political appointees at the DOJ and FBI are similarly putting our national security at risk,” wrote Ranking Member Raskin.

According to a stunning news report published Monday by Goldberg, who does not appear to possess a security clearance, The Atlantic journalist was added on March 13 to a Signal group chat titled “Houthi PC small group,” meant to serve as “a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis” in the lead up to the Administration’s strikes against the rebel group. This chat included some of the Administration’s most senior officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

Beginning on March 14, chat members began discussing an attack on the Houthis in Yemen. Highly sensitive information shared in the chat in subsequent hours came to include “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” 

Goldberg initially chose not to share the details shared by Trump cabinet officials as he believed “information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.”

But, after the Trump Administration insisted that sensitive attack plans do not constitute classified material in a desperate attempt to downplay the massive breach, The Atlantic today published the full contents of the Signal chain. Newly released screenshots show that Secretary Hegseth shared a number of highly sensitive operational details, including detailed attack plans, in the unsecure chain. If these messages had been received by an individual who was hostile to American interests, the consequences for the American pilots involved in the mission could have been catastrophic. 

Ranking Member Raskin explained that the usage of a commercial messaging service to transmit non-public defense information appears to violate U.S. criminal statutes, including the Espionage Act of 1917. Under the Espionage Act, it is a crime to mishandle, misuse, or abuse certain national defense information, so that it does not fall into the wrong hands.

Further, these actions may have violated the Federal Records Act, which governs the retention of government records, since messages on the Signal chain were set to automatically delete—some within one week.

Ranking Member Raskin demanded the DOJ and FBI provide written responses or a briefing to Congress by no later than Friday, March 28, on whether personal phones may have been used in this stunning breach of national security laws, protocol, and common sense. 

“This situation is perhaps one of the most humiliating and dangerous national security breaches in modern American history, one that put the lives of American service members and intelligence officers carrying out military operations abroad at risk, and a rupture in national security protocol that almost certainly violates federal criminal and civil statutes,” added Ranking Member Raskin.

Click here to read the letter.